Thursday, December 24, 2009

Effective Web Design is essential for good search engine optimization. If you do not tell the search engines what your pages are all about and what you would like to rank for, how do you ever hope to rank for those terms? Page Title is historically the home of the vane. Often filled with corporate identities, tag lines and in essence, wasted as a result. You have 96 characters that are the very first words that appear on your page….. use them wisely for your main keywords.

Alt Text is the text that appears in place of your images if a visitor has images disabled. A happy by product is that although the search engines can’t read image content, they can read your alt text on each of your images. Make sure that you fill the alt text with your main keywords for every image on your page.

Use Heading Tags to focus your keywords for search. The search engines love to see Heading tags used as they indicate what a paragraph or section of your page is going to be about. The more focused your pages, with tight focused Headings the better, as they will be viewed as high quality content and ranked as such.

Each of your pages should ideally be focused on just one subject. If the search engines see that your page is all about one thing from start to finish, it will conclude that it is a better page than one that discusses lots of different subjects. As a direct consequence you will rank higher with that page.

The search engines can only rank you for words that it can find within your content. The more frequently it finds each keyword, the more important your page will be considered for that keyword…. Up to the point when you will be thrown out for keyword spamming. To avoid this, write naturally, fro your readers, but pay attention to what the search engines need to see too.

If the search engines can’t follow your links then your pages will never be found or ranked. Websites designed using Flash, or with Java Script Menus can often suffer in search as the content is inaccessible. Plain simple web design will give you the best search engine rankings.

If you are tempted to cheat by using underhand practices to improve your rankings then be aware of the consequences when you get caught… which you will. Your site will be removed from the rankings and you will have little recourse to getting it re listed. There is little benefit to using “Black hat” techniques as you will be reported if you try to rank for competitive search terms, and if you are targeting low traffic keywords…. Why bother in the first place?

In Summary, concentrating on effective design is essential for good SERPS, planning your site layout before it is build can buy you free rankings that will take a lot longer with an inefficient site design.